The Supreme Court continues to dole out really bad rulings. Shortly after supporting anti-LGBTQ discrimination, further muting voting rights, and making some awful decisionsabout abortion clinics, the highest court in the U.S. decided to uphold Donald Trump’stravel Muslim ban, effectively siding with state-sanctioned islamophobia, according to NBC.
The ban stops refugees and immigrants from coming into the U.S., for an extended period of time, from five Muslim-majority countries: Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. The ban also halts immigrants and refugees from North Korea and Venezuela.
Trump first introduced the executive order the month he became president, in January 2017, with plans to put it into effect almost immediately, setting off a series of protests in airports across the country. The ban went through several makeovers, each met with backlash, but the SCOTUS ultimately signed off on the third iteration of the executive order.
Despite Trump’s claim that the ban was “not a Muslim ban,” he noted an exception to the travel restrictions for Christians coming from these countries. In plain language, that means it’s a Muslim ban.
Trump faced so much backlash over the ban, and injunctions from several federal judges, that even he seemed shocked when the 5-4 decision was announced on Tuesday.
The decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, argues “that restricting entry of aliens who could not be vetted with adequate information was in the national interest,” and that the Immigration and Nationality Act gave Trump the authority to determine “whether and when to suspend entry, whose entry to suspend, for how long, and on what conditions.”
But the ban does little to protect the U.S. from terrorism. Instead, it continues to breed Islamophobic terrorism within the states. Shortly after the first ban was signed, a mosque in Texas was set on fire, and hate crimes against Muslims have continued to increased since Trump took office.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg issued the dissenting opinion. “A reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus,” they contend, adding that “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”
There’s no question that SCOTUS made the wrong decision today. It’s only a matter of how long it will take, and how many people with have to suffer by it, for them to recognize the gravity of their mistake.
